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Title: Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain by Antonio Damasio ISBN: 0-15-602871-9 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A survey of the impact of feelings on daily lives
Comment: Joy, sorrow and the feeling brain are considered in Antonio Damasio's Looking For Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, And The Feeling Brain, a survey of the impact of feelings on daily lives. Such feelings have often been considered too private for science to explain and have been largely ignored: neuroscientist Damasio draws on his own research and experience with neurological patients to consider how emotions support survival itself.
Rating: 5
Summary: A window on emotions
Comment: Damasio has leapt almost to the top of the philosophical pyramid with his books on feelings and consciousness. Unbound by consensus thinking, he shows how the brain and body collaborate in forming what we call the "mind". In this book he reaches back in time to the works of Baruch Spinoza, perhaps the first philosopher with insights on emotions and will. Spinoza roundly refuted the separation of mind and body postulated by Descartes - a thesis with amazing tenacity. Damasio wants to revive the teachings of Spinoza in light of modern research's recent findings verifying and enlarging the Dutch philosopher's ideas. He possesses a unique style in supporting his campaign, with an ability to mix conversational and clinical presentations with fluid ease. This is his finest effort.
Damasio blithely overturns traditional philosophy by giving the body a primary role in developing emotions. What the mind feels, the body has already expressed. Because the body and brain are so deeply integrated in their functions, the combined signals are manifested as "emotion". Our feelings of joy, sorrow and the host of other classifications we use in defining ourselves are the expressions of the interactions. What we say about feelings may be applied to the entire realm of what we call "awareness". In short, the mind represents the body - we react to its actions. Spinoza, without realizing it, was far in advance of his contemporaries.
Damasio uses the wealth of research he and others have obtained over many years to support his contentions. In line with those in the forefront of "neurophilosophy", Damasio attributes evolutionary roots for his proposal. Other animals, he reminds us, react in similar ways to similar stimuli. They haven't the ability to express their reactions in language, but the body language says it sufficiently. Human evolution merely took these root causes a step further. Language, however, and the urge to detach us from the rest of the animal kingdom led us to also separate mind and body. Damasio, following both Spinoza and the finds of cognitive science, seeks to restore the integration.
With an intelligible prose style, enhanced by diagrams and line drawings, this book is a treasure of information. The questions he raises, while jarring to anyone steeped in traditional philosophy, need answering. He's never above noting where more work is required and posits topics to be investigated. The extensive bibliography is valuable in understanding what we know and what remains to be revealed. These revelations, Damasio reminds us, apply further afield than academic disputes over philosophical issues. The view of mind and body underlies most of our concepts of justice, government, public education and social behaviour generally. What gives this book its ultimate value is what basis we apply in addressing these issues. If traditional philosophy's foundation is a false bulwark, we must replace it with a more rational basis. Spinoza had not patience with arguments from ignorance, Damasio states. Nor should you. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Rating: 5
Summary: darn good book.
Comment: Basicially, Damasio's book provides a solid, testable, specific, plausible and elegant hypothesis about emotion and feeling. I found the book to be fascinating and enlightening.
While I do not agree with everything he says -
(specifically his evidence regarding the difference between 'feeling' and 'emotion' seems to me to point toward 'feeling' occuring earlier, at least in some form)
the science is there to be tried and tested.
The other thing I didn't like about it was the writing style was too much in the philosophical vein for my personal tastes... but then science is philosophy, and the style is conciously chosen for that reason.
Overall a great read, though. The ideas presented far, far *far* outweigh the minor complaints I have about the book.
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Title: The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio R. Damasio ISBN: 0156010755 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 10 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Descartes' Error : Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio R. Damasio ISBN: 0380726475 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 01 November, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are by Joseph Ledoux ISBN: 0142001783 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 28 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The EMOTIONAL BRAIN: THE MYSTERIOUS UNDERPINNINGS OF EMOTIONAL LIFE by Joseph Ledoux ISBN: 0684836599 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 27 March, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett ISBN: 0670031860 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 10 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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